WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

Tag Archives: Hildreth Compressor Station

FERC took less than a week to rubberstamp Sabal Trail’s first of February
request, and Sabal Trail took less than a week after that to put the
Metering and Regulation Station in service, connecting to Florida
Gas Transmission in Suwannee County, Florida,
onwards under the proposed phosphate mine site in Union and Bradford Counties,
to Jacksonville, where Eagle LNG and Crowley Maritime’s Carib Energy
are already sending LNG at least as far as Puerto Rico.
Do the “applicable
remaining terms and conditions of the Orders” include not leaking,
like Sabal Trail already did at its nearby compressor station?

For more than 20 hours starting Saturday, September 29, 2018, the Sabal Trail interstate natural gas pipeline leaked “26.40516 MMscf” of “Non-odorized natural gas“ and “10,405.5 lbs” of “VOC” (presumably Volatile Organic Compounds) at its Hildreth Compressor Station in Suwannee County, Florida. A week later Sabal Trail filed a report with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP), the text of which is appended to this letter.

I have several questions:

Why did Sabal Trail take more than a week to report this incident to FDEP?

Did Sabal Trail report this incident to PHMSA? If so, please send a copy of that report, or how to get it.

Has PHMSA filed a report about this incident? If so, please send a copy or how to get it.

Is PHMSA investigating this incident? If so, when will the investigation be complete? Are there any interim results or opportunities for public comment into the process?

Since Sabal Trail wrote “nothing in the yard caused alarms” and “Site is unmanned,” how did Sabal Trail discover this leak?

Sabal Trail didn’t
tell the state of Florida
until a week later that it had leaked odorless gas from its Hildreth Compressor Station site in Suwannee County, Florida.
And 10,405.5 pounds of Volatile Organic Compounds.
What were those possibly hazardous substances, Sabal Trail?

Apparently they weren’t prepared for lightning.
Where’s your vaunted cathodic ionization now, Sabal Trail?
You and all the other pipeline companies claim that will detect leaks.

Why are you having an outage at your Hildreth Compressor Station
in Suwannee County, Florida, Sabal Trail?
And are there continuing stink leaks at your site without a compressor
at Dunnellon, Florida in Marion County?
Meanwhile, you’re still shipping nothing.
For that $3 or $4 billion, much more
electricity from solar power
could be online right now in Florida, shutting down gas power plants
instead of building them.

Asked why a pipeline dispatcher apparently told the fire department
that “this was a new system and they are still
learning,” Grover responds that “it would be illogical
to speculate as to what the fire department has quoted as part of a
conversation.”

Or are those just Pinocchio donkey ears?
That would be more logical.

Who do you believe?
A local county fire department, or someone paid by a pipeline company
to put the best face on any event?
Especially when she didn’t actually deny anything Marion County Fire Rescue reported?

The Sabal Trail Pipeline, a new natural gas pipeline that critics
have charged is uncomfortably close to Florida’s main aquifer,
“operated safely throughout Hurricane Irma,” a
spokesperson with the pipeline operator tells ConsumerAffairs.

“We were and continue to be able to meet any customer
needs,” says an email from Andrea Grover of Enbridge Energy,
the natural gas company behind the Sabal Trail Pipeline.
“Operations was not affected by the hurricane impacts.”

Andrea Grover’s linkedin page
lists her as
“Director, Stakeholder Outreach at Enbridge (Oil & Gas)”.
For four years we were told the pipeline’s “stakeholders”
were landowners along the way.

But is Sabal Trail even serving those customers well?
Cody Suggs reported yesterday from the Hildreth Compressor Station site
near O’Brien, in Suwannee County, Florida, that power is still off there
and it took two days for trees to be cleared off the access road.

Natural gas began flowing through the Sabal Trail Pipeline in June
2017. People like John Quarterman, a Georgia landowner and activist
with WWALS Watershed Coalition, a group that aims to protect
watersheds in Georgia and Florida, say that federal regulators are
typically asleep at the wheel for these projects.

“We have this 500-mile improvised explosive device, under our
rivers, next to our schools and next to people’s houses and nobody
is handling pipeline safety,” he tells ConsumerAffairs.

Florida’s landscape is characterized by
karst terrain, or land made of porous limestone, caverns, and water
dissolving into the bedrock, all of which are a recipe for
sinkholes. Man-made infrastructure can increase the chance of a
sinkhole forming, and so can intense rain.

“Man-induced sinkholes typically involve collapse of old mine
workings, drainage infrastructure or other underground
workings,” explained meteorologist Jim Andrews in one recent
report. “Naturally, such can fail over time, and rainfall can
be a major factor.”

In fact, at least four homes have been evacuated in central Florida
this week after sinkholes formed in the wake of Hurricane Irma,
according to reporters on the scene. Still, Enbridge Energy says
that their pipeline can handle sinkhole-prone terrain.

“While opposition has raised the issue of the pipeline being
constructed in karst terrain, this was thoroughly examined by the
appropriate federal and state agencies,” responds Enbridge
representative Andrea Grover by email. “They concluded it was
unlikely that Sabal Trail would impact springs or the Floridan
Aquifer in the karst regions. Sabal Trail is well equipped to safely
construct and operate the pipeline in karst areas.”

Violations Sabal Trail and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP)
told us would not happen,
under oath in WWALS vs. Sabal Trail & FDEP (October 2015),
have already been happening.

But Quarterman says he does not trust the company to voluntarily
report any issues that may arise. Activists with his group who live
along the pipeline route have been tracking the project themselves,
both before and after Hurricane Irma, to make sure no leaks,
sinkholes underneath the pipeline, or any other issues have
occurred.

An anonymous informant sent these aerial pictures of what appear to be the
Sabal Trail drill sites at the Suwannee and Santa Fe Rivers, plus the Hildreth
Compressor Station near O’Brien, apparently taken Thursday 22 December 2016.